I have researched different editors, even though I am not planning on directly doing the editing for any serious projects. Mostly in order to become familiar with them and try my hand at some simple video editing of my planned video blog entries on the project as a whole. While Adobe and Sony are the biggest consumer/pro players in this space (besides high end names like Avid) I came across Lightworks and was intrigued.

… we invite you to get familiar with Lightworks, an Academy and Emmy award winning professional-grade editor with over 20 years of history in the film and broadcast industry. Having cut hundreds of films such as Pulp Fiction, The Departed, Centurion and Shutter Island, it includes a full feature set of editorial tools — from advanced trimming and media management, to stereoscopic support and realtime effects including multiple secondary colour correctors. Lightworks has an advanced effects pipeline, utilizing the power of your GPU. And with support for up to 2K workflows with realtime effects, it is the most advanced editing application available.

This has got to be expensive, right? A professional editor that has been used on “real” films and has been updated with the latest features like GPU rendering doesn’t come cheap.

Now you can freely download the most intuitive and advanced editor available. This is not a trial download. From here forward, you will always be able to download and use the latest version of Lightworks for free.

Some time in the middle of 2011, we hope to reach our next milestone — releasing the source code to any developer who wants to build upon what we started. We wish we were ready to do that now. However, before we can release any source, we have several hundred thousand lines of code to review to make sure it’s all cleared for opening up. We are making progress but we are not there yet.

It is now free and they are working on open sourcing it. And while there are other open source editors out there, most notably Blender which does editing and so much more, this is one of the few open source NLE’s that has been used on so many large commercial projects, I’m going to cherry pick from the list Lightworks has up:

The King’s Speech
Shutter Island
Bruce Almighty
Evan Almighty
Monster in Law
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Road to Perdition
Moulin Rouge
28 Days Later
Johnny English
Laws of Attraction
Pride and Prejudice
The Rainmaker
The People vs Larry Flint
Pleasantville
Romeo + Juliet
Scream
The Truman Show
Pulp Fiction
Mrs Doubtfire
Gangs of New York
Braveheart
Batman Forever
Con Air
Good Will Hunting
Bringing Out the Dead
Mission Impossible
Jerry Maguire
Kiss the Girls
Goodfellas
Raging Bull
LA Confidential
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Laws of Attraction
Crocodile Hunter
Chicago